Who Is On The Attack Here?

But I think attacking someone’s religion is really going too far. It’s just not the American way, and I think people will reject that. ~Mitt Romney

Romney said that on The Today Show in response to Huckabee’s question in the Chafets profile. David Kuo made the right point about this:

I’m sorry but I am really confused about all of this. Since when is asking a question about someone’s religion attacking it?? This is bizarre.

Kuo referred to Romney’s appearance as “pathetic.”

I am obviously just about as strongly opposed to Romney as you can be, but no one can possibly confuse me for a fan of Huckabee, either. I think Romney’s Mormonism is something that is legitimate for voters to take into account, but I also know that Huckabee has stated publicly time and again that he thinks it should be irrelevant. (Here he makes the statement as clearly as anyone could possibly want.) As a matter of fairness and accuracy, it seems wrong to impute to Huckabee the views and motives of those who are going to vote against Romney on account of his religion unless there is evidence that he actually holds such views and has such motives. Huckabee has plenty of flaws, all of which are amply detailed in the same Chafets profile. Ironically, by focusing on this one sentence, the media and Romney are giving Huckabee an easy out on his genuinely worrisome record and policy views. By protesting about one sentence, which they must regard in itself as an irrelevancy, and ignoring the serious flaws in Huckabee’s ideas (or lack thereof in certain cases), the media are actually empowering the candidate who stands to benefit from the anti-Mormon reaction among Republican voters. Whatever Romney may or may not have accomplished with his speech last week, he stands to lose by embracing the rhetoric of the oppressed minority (which, if you haven’t noticed, does not exactly win over conservative voters).

The small but growing effort to tar Huckabee as some sort of sectarian campaigner or incipient theocrat strikes me as wrong on the merits and seriously counterproductive for those making the argument. If I am a caucus-goer or a primary voter who has not firmly committed to another candidate, I could very easily see Mitt Romney as someone working with the mainstream media to accuse a social conservative candidate of bigotry. Think about how that appears to a conservative audience. It does not make Romney look better to them, let me tell you.

It seems to me that you give people the benefit of the doubt in these cases. Huckabee was probably innocently asking the question he asked, and he has since gone out of his way to make it clear that he thinks that the issue shouldn’t be part of the campaign. He has had opportunities to say publicly whether he thought Mormonism was Christian or not, and he demurred. He could have very easily said something else, but chose not to do so. If you find all the talk about Mormonism disconcerting, you really don’t want to get things to the point where Huckabee feels compelled to start answering those questions by labeling Huckabee, pretty much baselessly, as a “sectarian” who is playing “the Mormon card.”

More bizarre yet is Romney’s reaction. The question that Huckabee asked actually reflects Mormon teaching with a reasonable degree of accuracy. (You can say that it takes this view out of context and implies something that the LDS church does not teach, but I think this is a reach.) If, in fact, Huckabee doesn’t know much about Mormonism, his question might reflect something that he has heard over the years and was asking in the natural give and take of conversation. Now you can argue that he shouldn’t have said it, or you can argue that Chafets shouldn’t have included it, but Romney’s reaction doesn’t really make sense unless he finds the tenets of his own religion so embarrassing and strange that the mere mention of them constitutes an “attack” or unless you are a candidate, as Romney is, in need of something, anything, you can use to tear down your opponent. Of course these beliefs are a political liability, as we all know, but if Romney believed what he said last Thursday that those who think these things matter “underestimate the American people” he cannot possibly see a mere question as an attack worthy of condemnation.

Pluralism doesn’t mean that we all become silent about matters of great importance. You do not really have a free society if asking questions is considered an assault. More basically, you need something more substantial than this if you’re going to charge someone with attacking your religion.

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4 Responses to Who Is On The Attack Here?

I am torn on whether Huckabee’s remarks were innocent. Yes, in everyday conversation, you and I might ask our friends “Don’t the Mormons believe Jesus and the Devil are brothers” or “Do you think Romney wears funny underwear?”

However, Huckabee isn’t having everyday conversations with his friends. He is, as you point out from time to time, running for President of the United States, and in this specific case, he was having a conversation with a New York Times reporter.

At some point, if Huckabee really wants to argue that voters should consider Romney’s doctrinal beliefs in their voting process, he should come out and say it, not make a coy argument that he just didn’t know much about Mormonism and hoped that the reporter could help him out.

On the other hand, this is Huckabee we’re talking about, so if I had to guess whether the question was caused by incompetance or malice, I would bet on incompetance. (If someone smarter and more disciplined, like, say, Hillary, had asked the question, I might go the other way).

That’s the thing–Huckabee has repeatedly said that he thinks these doctrinal questions are irrelevant. Romney supporters and journalists read into things that he says or doesn’t say whatever sinister, underhanded “coded” messages they think he must be trying to send, and then they treat their rather tendentious reading of his remarks as God’s own truth, if you will. His new ads don’t use the “Christian leader” line, which seems to show that he responded to the criticism that it was too much or was seen as an attack on Romney’s religion. As for the article, there was really no way, short of active collaboration with the author, that Huckabee could be sure that such a remark would even make it into the final edition of the article, and again it was the author who pressed Huckabee on this question. He didn’t volunteer this out of the blue.

The displays of outrage and offense from Romneyites persuade me that they aren’t interested in understanding what happened in that interview or what Huckabee meant. They are looking for anything they can find to take down Huckabee now that their candidate is losing, and it’s just becoming embarrassing to watch. The revealing thing about all this for me is that a true statement about something Mormons believe is regarded by Romney’s supporters as a pernicious assault. They have based their support for him on the idea that these things don’t or shouldn’t matter to people, but they do matter, at least to some folks. Instead of acknowledging real difference and facing whatever consequences there may be, the Romneyites want to try to evade substance and treat any hint of curiosity or discussion as an insult. This makes them and their candidate seem much worse and even more evasive. The funny thing is that Romney is probably running off even those voters who wouldn’t care about his religion by being so evasive and defensive.

My guess is that the NRO crowd has convinced themselves to the point where they’re at least internally sincere, but as I said, if you have to guess whether Huckabee’s a relative innocent who’s not ready for prime time or a sinister manipulator, I would guess the first thing.

With that said, the exchange on NRO about whether “the only guy with a theology degree” should need to ask questions of random reporters to learn things about Mormonism is pretty funny.

The theology degree aspect of all this is funny. It may be that Huckabee knows more than he’s letting on, and the question was phrased in a way that could conceivably lead people to draw the wrong conclusions (i.e., that it must imply some positive view of the devil or something of the sort, which is not the case), but it still seems to me that the question was pretty harmless even if Huckabee intended to stir the pot.